The young man smiled. “Yes, I think she ought to go home. Some members of my family will be very happy to see her.”
He led the silent girl out of the house. At the gateway he paused while she rushed to the canal’s edge to heave emptily into the water, all under the mute, astonished gaze of Lion and Telpoch.
Yaotl laughed. “Demons, indeed!”
Fortitude, Telpoch reflected, was one of the most important qualities of a priest, but he had rarely needed it so much as now. Listening to his friend boasting of his own cleverness would try any man’s patience.
“I can’t pretend I knew all along,” Yaotl admitted, as they squatted in the priest house that night, enjoying the end of the fast and their first food since daybreak. “I’m not that clever!”
“No, really?” Telpoch spoke through a mouthful of leftover porridge.
“But you know what gave it away?”
“Do tell.”
“Lion’s mentioning my mother. There’d been all that stuff the householder said about his wife, and it occurred to me that the little woman would have found some way to get back at him. So she puts something in his food — that’s why he couldn’t stomach her cooking. She doesn’t do it all the time, of course, and it’s never anything deadly: just some emetic root, enough to make him thoroughly miserable.
“She didn’t break the ladle by accident. I suppose they’d had a row and she thought it was time for his medicine. So she found an excuse to go indoors for a cup. She put some of the poison in it, and topped it up with porridge from the pot.”
Telpoch swallowed the last of his food and yawned. “And then Flower Necklace snatched the cup out of his hands before he’d had a chance to taste it.” He wanted to get this over with so that he could sleep.
“That’s right. The poor woman would have been aghast. She knew the girl wouldn’t be seriously ill, but all the same, she obviously thought she’d better look after her, at least until she stopped puking. But it wouldn’t have done just to run after them, would it? She’d have to own up to what she’d been doing.”
“So it was her on the roof.”
“She’s small enough. She scared my brother off, but I expect the girl was too frightened to run away before her stomach started churning.” Yaotl laughed. “It’s funny, but Lion didn’t seem all that happy to be reunited with her, did he?”
Telpoch’s only reply was a loud snore.
What Happened to Mary?
by Bill Pronzini
© 2008 by Bill Pronzini
At the recent Edgar Allan Poe Awards banquet in New York, Bill Pronzini was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, that organization’s most prestigious award. It’s an honor richly deserved, for he is one of the most versatile, insightful, and prolific authors the genre has known — equally accomplished at character study or action scene, historical or contemporary settings. His novel The Other Side of Silence is due out soon.
When you live in a small town and something way out of the ordinary happens, it’s bound to cause a pretty big fuss. Such as a woman everybody knows and some like and some don’t disappearing all of a sudden, without any warning or explanation. Tongues wag and rumors start flying. Folks can’t seem to talk about anything else.
That’s what happened in my town last year. Ridgedale, population 1,400. Hundred-year-old buildings around a central square and bandstand, countryside all pine-covered hills, rolling meadows, and streams full of fat trout. Prettiest little place you’d ever want to see. Of course, I’m biased. I was born and raised and married here, and proud to say I’ve never traveled more than two hundred miles in any direction in the fifty-two years since.
Mary Dawes, the woman who disappeared, wasn’t a native herself. She moved to Ridgedale from someplace upstate after divorcing a deadbeat husband. Just drifted in one day, liked the look of the town, got herself a waitress job at the Blue Moon Cafe and a cabin at the old converted auto court on the edge of town, and settled in. Good-looking woman in her thirties, full of jokes and fun, and none too shy when it came to liquor, men, and good times. She had more than her share of all three in the year or so she lived here, but I’m not one to sit in judgment of anybody’s morals. Fact is, I own Luke’s Tavern, Ridgedale’s one and only watering hole. Inherited it from my father, Luke Gebhardt, Senior, when he died twenty years ago.
Mary liked her fun, like I said, and rumor had it she didn’t much care if the man she had it with was married or single. But she never openly chased married men and she wasn’t all that promiscuous, even if some of the wives called her the town slut behind her back. One relationship at a time and not flagrant about it, if you know what I mean. She came into the tavern one or two nights a week and drank and laughed and played darts and pool with the other regulars, but I never once saw her leave with a man. She made her dates in private. And never gave me or anybody else any trouble.
One of the regulars gave her trouble, though, same as he gave trouble to a lot of other folks at one time or another. Tully Buford, the town bully. Big, ugly, with bad teeth and the disposition of a badger. Lived by himself in a run-down little farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Carpenter and woodworker by trade, picked up jobs often enough to get by because he was good at his work.
Thing about Tully, he was more or less tolerable when he was sober, but when he drank more than a few beers he turned loud-mouthed mean. More than once I had to throw him out when he had a snootful. More than once the county sheriff’s deputies had to arrest him for fighting and creating a public disturbance, too, but he never started any fights or did any damage in my place. If he had, I’d’ve eighty-sixed him permanently. Worse he ever did was devil people and throw his weight around, and as annoying as that was, I couldn’t justify barring him from the premises for it.
Oh hell now, Luke Gebhardt, be honest. You were afraid if you did bar him, he’d come in anyway and start some real serious trouble.
He was capable of it. Town bully wasn’t all he was. Vandal, too, or so most of us believed; Ridgedale had more than its share of that kind of mischief, all of it done on the sly at night so nobody could prove Tully was responsible. Animal abuse was another thing he was guilty of. Doc Dunaway saw him run down a stray dog with his pickup and swore it was deliberate, and there’d been some pet cats, a cow, and a goat shot that was likely his doing.
So it was easier and safer to just stay clear of him whenever possible and try to ignore him when it wasn’t. The only one who felt and acted different was J.B. Hatfield, but I’ll get to him in a minute.
Now and then Tully tried to date Mary Dawes. Like every other woman in Ridgedale, she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Just laughed and made some comical remark meant to sting and walked away. One night, though, he prodded her too long and hard and she slapped his face and told him if he didn’t leave her alone, he’d have to go hunting a certain part of his anatomy in Jack Fisher’s cornfield. Everybody had a good laugh over that and Tully went stomping out. That was two days before Mary disappeared.
Disappeared into thin air, seemed like. One day she was there, big as life, and the next she was gone. The last time any of us saw her was when she left the tavern, alone, about eleven-thirty on a warm Thursday night in October.
She hadn’t told anybody she was thinking of leaving Ridgedale, hadn’t given notice at the Blue Moon. On Friday, Harry Duncan, the Blue Moon’s owner, went out to her cabin at the old auto court. Her car was there but she wasn’t. She hadn’t checked out and none of the other residents had seen her leave or knew where she’d gone. That’s when everybody started asking the same question.